Monday, November 14, 2011

"Medicine, Health, and Publics," Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) Preconference, held in conjunction with the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Biennial Conference, Philadelphia, May 24-25, 2012.

Health and medicine occupy increasingly prominent places in public discourse with citizen advocates playing significant roles in developing, engaging, and critiquing biomedical texts and practices. But how, exactly, have diverse stakeholders used rhetoric to shape the discourses and practices of health and medicine? This preconference will address the multiple ways that publics and the medical establishment mutually influence one another. Preconference papers should extend theory, criticism, and/or practice related to the rhetoric of medicine and publics by addressing one or more of the following themes: the roles of new media in health advocacy, the place of direct-to-consumer advertisements in public health discourse, the successes and failures of health-related social movements, expert and lay health risk discourses, biomedical stakeholder engagement initiatives, the construction of publics in medical rhetoric, or any another topic that directly speaks to the preconference theme. Papers and presentations reflecting diverse methods spanning conventional and critical-cultural rhetorical analysis, ethnography, interviewing, discourse analysis, and hybrid methods are welcome. The strongest submissions may be invited for revision for publication in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities on "Medicine, Health, and Publics," edited by Lisa Keränen.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)